Power of Making

In 2011, the V&A and Crafts Council celebrated the role of making in our lives by presenting Power of Making, an eclectic selection of over 100 exquisitely crafted objects, ranging from a life-size crochet bear to a ceramic eye patch, a fine metal flute to dry stone walling. The exhibition was a cabinet of curiosities showing works by both amateurs and leading makers from around the world to present a snapshot of making in our time.

Objects featured in Power of Making

Power of Making videos

These videos explore the themes of making and include some of the artists featured in the exhibition discussing the processes of making. Many were filmed in the Tinkerspace a participatory demonstration space within the exhibition itself.

Power of Making introduction video

So this is how you would, this is kind of a technique that is quite conventional in shoe-making, stretching the leather around. It’s the wetting of the leather that is a bit less common.

Shauna Richardson, Crochetdermist: I start with a solid form and then I freestyle crochet using the one single stitch, responding to the anatomy, so I’m highlighting different parts of the anatomy using the direction of the stitch.

Matt Durran, Artist, curator and glass designer:

This is 170 degrees and we are just bending the glass over the form. Once the glass is in the right position I will fan the door to get the temperature down to an even temperature.

Stephen Wessel, Flute-maker:

I think craft or working with your hands is fundamental to being human. Making is life to me, it’s what I do.

When we started we wanted to make a lightweight simple flute so we thought why don’t we use a modern material instead of silver for the keywork. So we put our heads together and said ‘stainless steel’ and then we thought ‘stainless steel on a silver tube, hang on a minute, people might not like the look of that because although they are both shiny metals they are different colours’. And I think it was John who suggested ‘why don’t we put some other material with it and inlay it’ and we found a bar of black plastic and we recessed it and popped a black inlay piece in and looked at it from all angles and thought ‘mmm, maybe we’ve got something here, let’s pursue this one’

Marloes ten Bhömer, Shoe designer:

So I started studying my BA in Product Design in Arnheim. There was equipment to make a structurally sound object, they were all placed in the product design department. So that is where the interest in shoes started. I know about little bit about conventional shoe-making but I am more interested in re-thinking how a shoe can be made and for that I need those different areas and different aspects of design. Matt Durran, Artist, curator and glass designer:

So on the table is basically the process of my involvement in the nose cartilage molding system. Basically, what we initially do is either we take a straight cast of silica from the patient or they send us a profile. Basically, I am producing the glass, which is then used for the molding. The glass then supports the polymer that they use in surgery. Shauna Richardson, Crochetdermist: Crochet was something I learnt to do when I was very young. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t crochet but I do remember going to clubs at junior school when I was around 8 or 9, and my granny was always making things. There has been a revival of a real interest in crochet or knitting - something that hadn’t quite happened when I first started making the crochet pieces so the element of it being popular wasn’t something I was thinking about when I first started the collection, but again it is another area that feeds into my exploration of the ‘anything can be art’ theory. Matt Durran, Artist, curator and glass designer:

I kind of feel that everything I do is an artistic endeavour, it’s just that the application of it; sometimes it’s in a gallery; sometimes it’s in a factory; sometimes it’s in a university and sometimes on a hospital ward. Marloes ten Bhömer, Shoe designer:

Most of the industry is not in the UK anymore. Some is in Spain, some is in Italy and Portugal, but what I am trying to do is produce everything in-house. I think it is called DIY Hacking, or in-house manufacturimg and I think it is the way forward for designers to be able to be at the forefront of their own practice and be able to make, produce and sell their work and not have to rely on far away manufacturing.

Stephen Wessel, Flute-maker: Being the sole maker of the entire instrument means that I have control over every single aspect of it and I know every part of it intimately. I am about the last one who is making flutes and nothing else for a living full-time. Shauna Richardson, Crochetdermist:

I think that anything that gives you the opportunity to create something extraordinary and unique is a good thing, really. Stephen Wessel, Flute-maker:

However much you try to replace hand-making technologies in the workshop, there will always be room for the craftsman. There will always be a way of doing it by hand that is perhaps better than what the computer can achieve. Matt Durran, Artist, curator and glass designer:

I remember one time some kids came to the studio and they were looking for the scrap metal and they informed us that they thought we were poor because we were working with our hands, and we thought that was such a massive misconception, because we never thought we were poor because we were working with our hands and I think it is really important that people really re-engage with actually making things.

Jacquy Pfeiffer of The French Pastry School discusses his sugar sculpture created in the V&A kitchen for the exhibition.

This exhibit is dear to my heart because it’s exactly what I’m about. I see something done in a medium that has nothing to do with chocolate or sugar or bread and I find a way to make it work, do you see? So it’s very, very fascinating to be able to duplicate things and that’s why this exhibit is so great because when you look a little bit at how things are done and why they are done a certain way, like - oh, my God, I never thought of that! Right? What we do in pastry is all about craft. It’s all about using our hands and using elements and putting them together.

We cast hot sugar in here, let it cool a little bit and then I’m going to lay this guy on there to make kind of like … not a smoked glass, but an etched glass technique. And then after that I’m going to put it on here to bend it.

Dale Chihuly is definitely an inspiration, but it’s also a glass blower, Lino Tagliapietra, who’s an Italian master who is just out of this world, out of this world. I did three years of glass blowing and we did a lot of new techniques because of that. I’m going to show you one in a box, if we can go in a box here …

This is a technique that is completely inspired from glass blowing. In glass blowing we learn to make a technique like this, putting bubbles in a sphere using a mould, a wooden mould, a pineapple mould it’s called. So I just racked my brains – it took me three months to figure out how to make it, but here it is. You see this is a sphere that then has pieces added on there, you see. And then it looks like the final product. It’s one piece, but other pieces attached to it.

I intend on being here for at least six hours straight, hopefully. So hopefully I’m finished at midnight, but otherwise I’ll just continue working until it’s done, you know.

The problem with pastry chefs is we’re not trained as artists. No pastry chef ever goes to art school and they actually should. But I think that my sense of colours and shapes has evolved a lot because I’ve been doing this pulled sugar thing for 36 years now, so I’ve got to get better at it, right? Running out of time, right, you know?

Matt Denton discusses Hexapod robots.

The first Hexapod is a small, small unit, a little white Hexapod which is actually a kit one now, and it's fairly basic but has mandibles for the head which means you can walk around and pick stuff up. But it's also been equipped with a small camera today, so there's a bit of software running on a laptop, and the software looks, takes the feed from the camera and looks for red objects, so at the moment it's following a little red ball around.

The next Hexapod is a bigger version of the same kit, so it's a big black Hexapod, and again it has a mandible for the head so it has a set of jaws that it can pick things up with. Today it's just been used like a remote control car, so from a set of joysticks I can control it's walking direction, I can control the speed that it walks at, I can control it's body attitude so again, the pitch and rotate and the yaw.

This machine is a lot more advanced. It's a heavier machine, it's more stable, and it has sensors on the feet which are basically just switches so it can tell when it's in contact with the floor. The other two machines, their world is a flat surface, that's all they know about. This machine can walk over rough terrain because it can know when it's touching the floor so for example if I pick it up, the legs will search for the table, and as I put it back down again I can put back down on my hand and it will adapt to the shape of my hand, and the table.

This is a Hexapod which has been given a camera again for it's head, it's been stylised, the head, a lot of it is just for show, but there's a little CCTV camera in there, and that's feeding back to a computer system that sits underneath of it. And that computer system has a much more advanced algorithm that's looking for faces, so it looks for eyes and the mouth of the face in a crowd of people, and once it's picked up the face it can track multiple faces, but it'll find the closest one to it and it'll start tracking it so as the person moves around the camera, it'll move around with them and follow them about.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: It's super cool.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Well it's quite interesting because it has human-like movements, and the way it looks at your face is strange you know, you realise it's a machine but then it's kind of following you and behaving like a living thing.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: Yeah amazing, a really excellent talk on the work that he's done, and really really great to be able to interact with him and talk to him about something that he obviously cares a lot about, so yeah, brilliant, excellent.

Joanne Ayre discusses ceramics.

My name’s Joanne Ayre. I’m a Ceramicist and we’re here in the Tinkerspace in the Power of Making exhibition at the V&A. Today we’ve got a few different experiences for the visitors, one of them being a demonstration of casting which is a way of making ceramics from liquid clay. A casting slip is clay mixed with water with chemicals added called the deflocculant which helps keep the clay in suspension – it helps it to form a skin which makes the pot.

I’m just letting the excess clay run out and then that leaves a hollow form and leave it to drain. This one should be ready to come out. And when these are dry you clean them all up with a knife and a wet sponge and that’s called fettling and sponging.

I came here actually with one of my friends who thought that the exhibition would be quite a good way of catching-up and it was really nice to come and see there was something to sit down and use your hands and play with. We are both creative people. I do textile design and she’s a graphic designer so it’s quite nice to get your hands dirty. It’s like a little bonding exercise for the both of us. I love anything that’s hands-on and hand-made. It’s really nice to come in and have a little catch-up. The clay that we use is actually dug up from gardens and there’s no specific name for it so it’s quite nice. It’s my cup of tea - it’s something that’s raw and you get what you see.

We are all studying medical education and we all came here today as a field trip because we are, for the moment, looking at how we can use art to teach medicine. So what we’ve done is we’ve participated in the workshop. And I’ve got quite an interest in organic things and it being autumn at the moment and noticing all the different leaves and I made a little tray in a leaf shape and a flower to go with that.

I made a bench and it started looking like a very simple bench but then I worked it out into a very complicated bench that was used to, hopefully, be very comfortable to allow medical students to sit and enjoy tutorials and lectures.

Initially it was quite useful because we had a feel of all the types of clay to see what the qualities of the different things were and then we had a go with different types and I think you really wanted to have a go at the porcelain one because that’s more delicate.

I made a snowman and a I’ve made a hat for him to wear. And then I put some buttons on his tummy so he could keep warm. When I first touched the clay it wasn’t that cold actually. It was quite nice and cool.

Postlerferguson discuss the 'Make for London' project.

Make for London is a project of Postlerferguson and the V&A together during our residence here until Christmas 2011. It's basically two ideas on the one hand we tried to get ideas out of Londoners to basically produce new products, new services, to get new ideas out to generate business or to generate some creative action. On the other hand, we apply our product design and what we do for a living are expertise to those ideas and try to develop product hives and maybe even finished products until the end of that four months. We try to make their own modified Oyster cards into something a bit more than an Oyster card. We set up a simple modifying station where people can cut their Oyster cards, punch them, make whatever they like within the next one and half hours and then we see if the card still works afterwards and if they can do something nice with it. I made an Oyster card bookmark ... that's it ... I hope it will get me home still.

Dejan Mitrovic discusses Kideville

DEJAN MITROVIC: My name is Dejan. Originally I come from Serbia, and I came to London to do a Masters in Innovation Design and Engineering, where I have created a product called “Kideville”.

I thought of it by wanting to join my two big interests which are design for children and new technologies and rapid prototyping.

After a process of designing, where they first come up with the idea, they explore the different iterations of the idea, they sketch them on paper, make it out of plasticine, I introduce them to the CAD (Computer Aided Design) software where they make it using the computer, and then it’s printed for them on the 3D printer. So they see their results made in plastic, like this. It all becomes part of a wide group project which is the city, where each kid gets their own bit, their own plot of land, but it’s essentially one collaborative project, so they also learn how to contribute to a bigger group project.

The way the workshops work is, children come, I give them a piece of paper and say “design your dream house”. I encourage them to split the paper into 4 parts so that they think about the different views of the house, so the front view, the side view, the top and then a 3D view. Once they’ve done that, it helps them understand what their idea is, and what they want their idea to look like, and then they move onto the computer where they use special 3D software and quickly design it, mock it up in the CAD and then make a 3D file. After that, I take the file, put it onto the printer and it prints their house out of plastic.

Essentially how it works is, it reads a 3D file, and it reads it in lines so that it can follow those lines and build the model. Now when it reads the lines, it is melting a filament of plastic which is fed into the extruder up here, and it’s coming out in a very, very small line, and as the extruder moves in three dimensions, so essentially ‘X’ and ‘Y’ first of all, it lays the plastic in lines. When it finishes that one layer, the base moves down on the ‘Z’ axis a little bit, and that’s how it builds the next layer, and the next layer, and so approximately 0.1mm every time it moves, and that’s how it builds up the plastic. As it melts, as it comes out of the extruder, it solidifies straight away.

YOUNG GIRL #1: I haven’t got that far yet. It’s in the shape of an ‘N’, because my initial is ‘N’, and I think it’s meant to be kind of like an office building or something like that.

YOUNG BOY #1: It’s my house, it’s a bit crazy.

YOUNG BOY#2: You can see the chimney fully, then on the top you can see the chimney and just a circle.

YOUNG BOY #3: I had never done anything like it before, but it was definitely fun.

YOUNG GIRL #2: I had to draw a house or a building or something, then draw it in 3D, then I had to go on a website and do it in 3D.

About making

Daniel Charny, guest curator

Making is the most powerful way that we solve problems, express ideas and shape our world. What and how we make defines who we are, and communicates who we want to be.

For many people, making is critical for survival. For others, it is a chosen vocation: a way of thinking, inventing and innovating. And for some it is simply a delight to be able to shape a material and say 'I made that'. The power of making is that it fulfills each of these human needs and desires.

Those whose craft and ingenuity reach the very highest levels can create amazing things. But making is something everyone can do. The knowledge of how to make – both everyday objects and highly-skilled creations – is one of humanity's most precious resources.

Types of making

Makers use numerous different skills and techniques to shape their materials. All these techniques may be considered as falling into one of just three types.

Transforming techniques alter materials themselves. They include throwing clay, blowing glass, forging metal, and baking. The transformed states may be temporary or permanent. Irreversible transformations occur in processes like vacuum forming, stereolithography and casting.

Every object in this exhibition has been made by adding, subtracting or transforming material, or by combining these processes.

Learning a skill

Too many people never get a chance to experience the highest levels of making. Most can make something, at least at an amateur level, and many reach a professional standard. But there are many layers of expertise beyond that. It may take years to attain complete mastery.

At every stage in the learning process, a maker's relationship to materials and tools changes dramatically. What may at first have been frustrating becomes pleasurable. Makers start to think through their materials and skills, almost unconsciously. Once they learn how to use and care for a tool, makers might start modifying it, or even invent a new tool to replace it. In all these ways, learning a skill is a way of opening up future possibilities and challenges.

In the zone

Advanced skills may take a long time to learn, but the feeling of being 'in the zone' can be experienced by anyone – from a four-year-old to a master artisan. When you are absorbed in making, things happen that you didn't plan. The experience is intuitive, like sport, and it can be meditative, like music.

This sensation of effortless flow is a reward in its own right, but it is also a situation of intense learning. Makers who are immersed in what they are doing build on existing skills and discover new ones. Innovations in making happen, more often than not, when they are least expected.

Making new knowledge

All knowledge about making was once new. Someone, sometime, had to formulate it. But there is a big difference between established, 'traditional' forms of making and those which are innovative. Both are crucially important, and both can be expressive, but they serve different purposes.

Traditional ways of making have accumulated over generations. They are passed down from person to person, often through apprenticeships, and learned through repetition. Innovative making is less rehearsed, and may be less reliable. But it is more exploratory, with the potential to open up dramatic new directions. This can involve redirecting existing skills, or creating new ones from scratch.

All knowledge, even the most traditional, can be new for any individual. But some knowledge is new in the world. This exhibition celebrates both these types of discovery.

Thinking by making

Many people think that craft is a matter of executing a preconceived form or idea, something that already exists in the mind or on paper. Yet making is also an active way of thinking, something which can be carried out with no particular goal in mind. In fact, this is a situation where innovation is very likely to occur.

Even when making is experimental and open-ended, it observes rules. Craft always involves parameters, imposed by materials, tools, scale and the physical body of the maker. Sometimes in making, things go wrong. An unskilled maker, hitting the limits of their ability, might just stop. An expert, though, will find a way through the problem, constantly unfolding new possibilities within the process.

This content was originally written in association with 'Power of Making', a V&A and Crafts Council exhibition on display at the V&A South Kensington from 6 September 2011 - 2 January 2012.

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